Preet Bharara Shunned Politics. His End Was Tinged by Them.

Preet Bharara was removed from his post as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York by the Trump administration on Saturday.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Ten days into his tenure as United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara saw his political and prosecutorial worlds collide.

He convened a meeting to discuss a sensitive investigation of a Democratic donor with ties to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. Mr. Bharara had been Mr. Schumer’s chief counsel, and Mr. Schumer had recommended Mr. Bharara for the prosecutorial post.

At the meeting, Mr. Bharara asked his prosecutors if there was enough evidence to make a case against the donor, Hassan Nemazee. One of the prosecutors, Daniel W. Levy, who is now in private practice, would recall years later that he had told Mr. Bharara that there had been a wide-reaching bank fraud.

“Then take him,” Mr. Bharara said.

That case — one of his very first as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — foreshadowed a theme that Mr. Bharara harped on throughout his tenure pursuing a host of public corruption, terrorism, civil rights and Wall Street cases: Politics and prosecution do not mix.

On Saturday, the Trump administration fired him after he refused to follow a Justice Department order to resign immediately. The order, which was issued on Friday and also applied to 45 other holdover United States attorneys who served under the Obama administration, came only a few months after Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, had asked Mr. Bharara to stay in the job.

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Sheldon Silver, the former Democratic State Assembly speaker, was convicted of corruption in 2016, in a case brought by Preet Bharara’s office.Credit
Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times

“One hallmark of justice is absolute independence, and that was my touchstone every day that I served,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement on Saturday.

It was a sudden and highly politicized end to Mr. Bharara’s seemingly apolitical tenure, which was noted for prosecutions of powerful politicians of both parties, like Sheldon Silver, the former Democratic State Assembly speaker, and Dean G. Skelos, the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate. (Both men have appealed.)

Mr. Bharara’s dismissal will renew speculation about his plans for a postprosecutorial career. Although he has repeatedly denied political ambitions — “I have no interest and desire to seek political office,” he told The New York Times in a 2014 interview, adding, “Now or ever” — his confrontation with Mr. Trump could fuel talk that his political star is rising.

Still, Mr. Bharara had his critics, who accused him both of overreach — his office dismissed several high-profile insider trading cases after an appellate-court rebuke — and, at times, an unwillingness to be forceful enough. He never filed charges, for example, against two prominent people who were under investigation, Governor Cuomo and the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, who have each long denied wrongdoing. Nor did he charge any top bankers linked to the 2008 financial crisis.

And his embrace of the media spotlight sometimes struck the wrong chord with defense lawyers and judges.

The judge in Mr. Silver’s case, Valerie E. Caproni, found in 2015 that Mr. Bharara’s office had orchestrated a “media blitz” after the speaker’s arrest. Although she refused a defense request to dismiss charges, the judge added, “The U.S. attorney, while castigating politicians in Albany for playing fast and loose with the ethical rules that govern their conduct, strayed so close to the edge of the rules governing his own conduct that defendant Sheldon Silver has a nonfrivolous argument that he fell over the edge to the defendant’s prejudice.”

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Preet Bharara had a seemingly apolitical tenure, noted for prosecutions of powerful politicians from both parties.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Regardless, there is little doubt Mr. Bharara’s legacy will largely center on his prosecution of public officials.

“We are not trying to criminalize ordinary politics,” Mr. Bharara said in a speech at New York Law School in 2015. Nor, he said, were his prosecutors seeking to wag their fingers, serve as “morality cops” or demand that officials be free of vice. “Just try not to steal our money,” he said. “We simply want people in high office to stop violating the law. It seems like a simple and modest request.”

By the time his public corruption unit had won the convictions of Mr. Silver and Mr. Skelos, Mr. Bharara had successfully prosecuted a dozen current or former state legislators, as well as 15 local officials, party leaders, political consultants and fund-raisers, including two current or former New York City Council members. Only one was acquitted.

Not all of Mr. Bharara’s public corruption inquiries led to criminal charges, most notably his sweeping examination of Mr. Cuomo’s abrupt shutdown in March 2014 of an anticorruption commission that the governor had formed with great fanfare just nine months earlier. A Times investigation published in July 2014 showed that before disbanding the panel, known as the Moreland Commission, Mr. Cuomo had hobbled its work, intervening when it focused on groups with ties to the governor or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.

But after an investigation that spanned more than a year, Mr. Bharara said in January 2016 that his office had concluded that “absent any additional proof that may develop, there is insufficient evidence to prove a federal crime.”

Yet the Moreland Commission was clearly not far from Mr. Bharara’s mind. On Sunday afternoon, he used a recently opened personal Twitter account to say, “By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like.”

Mr. Bharara’s investigation clearly stuck with Mr. Cuomo as well. In the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Cuomo, who has done little to hide his frustration with Mr. Bharara, told a Trump adviser in passing that the prosecutor was “a bad guy,” saying, “Preet is not your friend,” according to a person familiar with the discussion. (A Cuomo spokeswoman denied that the governor had made such a statement.)

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Dean Skelos, left, the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, and his son Adam were convicted on corruption charges in December 2015.Credit
Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times

Mr. Bharara broadened the office’s global reach, prosecuting international terrorists, drug lords and money launderers. What might have been the biggest case got away in 2010 when the Obama administration dropped plans to bring five Guantánamo Bay detainees, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to Manhattan for a civilian trial on charges of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks.

But Mr. Bharara’s prosecutors won major convictions against terrorists like Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden and one of his spokesmen; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in the civilian system; and Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant who in 2010 tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. All three men received life sentences.

In October, the office is scheduled to try Ahmad Khan Rahimi on charges stemming from a bombing in September that injured more than 30 people in Manhattan. He has pleaded not guilty.

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Mr. Bharara was particularly unpopular with two foreign leaders whose nations have loomed large in reports about their ties to some of Mr. Trump’s close aides — and whose citizens were prosecuted by Mr. Bharara.

Mr. Bharara was among 18 United States officials barred from Russia in 2013 in retaliation to American sanctions imposed on Russians accused of rights violations. (Mr. Bharara was barred in response to his prosecution of Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer.)

And Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said there was “malicious intent” behind Mr. Bharara’s prosecution of Reza Zarrab, a gold trader who has Turkish and Iranian citizenship, according to Turkish news reports. Mr. Zarrab has pleaded not guilty to violating the United States’ sanctions on Iran.

In 2015, Mr. Bharara said in a talk that someone once “made the mistake of asking me the question, ‘What again is your jurisdiction, exactly?’”

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Preet Bharara at a news conference in October 2009, where he announced charges in a crackdown on insider trading in the hedge fund industry.Credit
Michael Nagle/Getty Images

“And I said, ‘Are you familiar with Earth?’” Mr. Bharara deadpanned.

In the white-collar realm, Mr. Bharara may be best remembered for his sweeping crackdown on insider trading in the hedge fund industry. The two most notable convictions growing out of a long-running investigation that began even before he took office were of Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund billionaire, and Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs director and McKinsey managing partner who was convicted of passing an inside tip on to Mr. Rajaratnam.

Mr. Bharara also secured a guilty plea against SAC Capital, the hugely successful hedge fund founded by Mr. Cohen. But Mr. Bharara’s office never was able to file criminal charges against Mr. Cohen, who has gone on to run a large family office called Point72 Asset Management that manages more than $10 billion of his personal fortune.

Mr. Bharara’s office secured convictions or guilty pleas against more than 70 hedge fund traders, analysts and consultants in insider trading cases. But he suffered a blow when a federal appellate court said his office had overreached and threw out the convictions of two former traders, Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson. The appellate ruling led Mr. Bharara to vacate guilty pleas and convictions of at least seven other people. (The Supreme Court later limited a portion of the appellate decision, offering some vindication for Mr. Bharara.)

Gregory Morvillo, Mr. Chiasson’s lawyer, said Mr. Bharara had “left his mark on Wall Street” but had “sometimes pushed the envelope too far.”

His office also secured big fines against banks, as well as a record penalty and guilty plea from BNP Paribas.

Mr. Bharara has not indicated what he will do next. But in the 2014 Times interview, he said he was not sure that he had “a taste for private practice.”

“My concern,” he added, “is I’m not sure I have a taste for anything but this.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2017, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A U.S. Attorney Who Shunned Politics Meets an End Tinged by Them. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe